What this disastrous week taught us about the Trump presidency
https://rss.ponder.cat/post/150184
rss.ponder.catWhat this disastrous week taught us about the Trump presidency - Pondercat RSS[https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/gettyimages-2207385984.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100]
President Donald Trump gestures while speaking during an executive order signing
event in the Oval Office of the White House on March 31, 2025, in Washington,
DC. Donald Trump’s tariffs were at once predictable and shocking. Predictable,
in the sense that Trump had been crystal-clear
[https://x.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1907638587387941075] about wanting
across-the-board tariffs during the campaign. Shocking, because they have been
implemented in a manner that appears extreme and incompetent
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trump-fake-tariff-rates-1.7501604] even by
previous Trump standards
[https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tariffs-antarctic-islands-heard-mcdonald/].
As a result, the world is historically unsettled: One metric of global economic
uncertainty shows higher levels of concern than at any point in the 21st century
[https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1908140423861706813], worse than the 2008
financial crisis and even the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It
turns out that this combination, both predictable and shocking, has become a bit
of a theme for the Trump team lately. Consider two other news stories, both of
which would be headline-grabbing scandals if it weren’t for the tariffs. First,
Trump has empowered Laura Loomer
[https://www.vox.com/politics/371794/laura-loomer-trump-campaign-911-marjorie-taylor-greene],
a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe,” to purge top
government officials
[https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/us/politics/trump-meeting-laura-loomer.html].
The head of the National Security Agency, his top deputy, and six staffers on
the National Security Council have all been fired this week — seemingly at
Loomer’s behest
[https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/national-security-agency-chief-deputy-director-dismissed-rcna199647].
Second, the Department of Health and Human Services started layoffs on Tuesday
that are expected to hit about 10,000 workers
[https://www.vox.com/health/406967/rfk-jr-hhs-cuts-vaccine-measles-outbreak]. By
the end of it, about a quarter of the department’s staff will have been cut amid
a worrying measles outbreak and the real risk of a bird flu pandemic. Trump
telegraphed these moves during the campaign — promising to root out the “the
deep state” and vowing to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” at HHS. But they
are shocking, nonetheless. Putting Laura Loomer, of all people, in charge of
sensitive national security decisions is nothing short of astonishing. And the
sheer scope of the HHS cuts, given the current public health challenges, led my
colleague Dylan Scott to describe the situation as an “unfolding catastrophe
[https://www.vox.com/health/406967/rfk-jr-hhs-cuts-vaccine-measles-outbreak].”
This, it seems, is the week where we saw the Trump administration’s true and
unvarnished face. It’s not that what happened this week was necessarily worse
than what came before it, though the tariffs might well prove to be. Rather,
it’s that the week revealed the true scope and nature of our Trump problem —
with even some of his supporters starting to openly worry that things have gone
badly wrong [https://www.richardhanania.com/p/kakistocracy-as-a-natural-result].
Put differently, the last week has shown, in no uncertain terms, that Trump is
acting like a mad king. ## What we just learned Trump had done shocking and
surprising things pretty much since he entered office on January 20. His
blatantly political assault on universities, his decision to send innocent
Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag, his bizarre crusade to make Canada “the 51st
state,” his unlawful efforts to shut down entire federal agencies like USAID —
all of this made clear that we were in for an unhinged approach to governance.
But even after all that, some people thought there still might be constraints.
Previous rounds of tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada did not lead Wall Street
to panic — partly because they were moderated or walked back after
implementation. Many conservatives alarmed by Trump’s policies reassured
themselves that his national security team, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio
and national security adviser Mike Waltz, hailed from the GOP’s more traditional
internationalist wing. Now, there is panic even in these quarters. Wall Street
is horrified; the S&P 500 lost more value this week in absolute terms than it
did during the entire 2008 financial crisis
[https://x.com/LJKawa/status/1908176050854428900]. Republican stalwarts like Ben
Shapiro
[https://www.mediamatters.org/ben-shapiro/ben-shapiro-trumps-tariffs-are-massive-tax-increase-american-consumers-and-it-designed]
and Erick Erickson [https://x.com/EWErickson/status/1907593286681833943] are
warning of dire economic and political consequences if Trump stays the course on
tariffs. And the notion that the GOP national security “professionals” might
check any of this is no longer credible: This week, Waltz was made to sit in an
Oval Office meeting
[https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/us/politics/trump-meeting-laura-loomer.html]
during which Loomer listed off staff members of his to be fired. Even Sen. Ted
Cruz (R-TX) said that the tariffs could well be “terrible for America.” The
point is not merely to mock these people or say, “I told you so.” Rather, it’s
to illustrate that even those who wore blinders about Trump are starting to see
what’s happening. And what’s happening is this: government by mad king. The
phrase “mad king” has been tossed around a lot in the past few weeks, but I
think it’s worth offering a more precise definition. A mad king, in my sense, is
not merely a leader who makes bad decisions. Nor is it a literal king who
assumed office through heredity rather than, say, free and fair elections.
Instead, it’s one who makes them based on reasons that are out of touch with
reality, making sense only in their own mind. And it’s one who is able to do so
with little-to-no constraint — thanks, in our case, to the dangerous
concentration of power in the executive branch
[https://www.vox.com/politics/407053/trump-tariff-expensive-democracy-authoritarianism-breakdown].
The events of this week show conclusively that the president fits the
definition. Trump decided to detonate the global economy because of his
decades-old belief, in defiance of a consensus of economists, that tariffs are
the key to American prosperity. No one, not even his previously demonstrated
concern for the stock market, could stop him from acting on it. A mad king
economic policy. Trump has given partial control over the national security
bureaucracy of the world’s greatest military power to a demonstrably unstable
conspiracy theorist who once chained herself outside of Twitter’s headquarters.
The people who were supposed to keep Trump in bounds were proven powerless, and
(in Waltz’s case) outright humiliated. A mad king national security policy.
Trump has outsourced public health decisions to an unqualified nepo baby who has
embraced nearly every unfounded health theory out there. He then allowed that
man to decimate the ranks of our public health bureaucracy in the midst of at
least two serious public health crises. The traditionally credentialed
individuals in Trump’s health team, like NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, have
proven no constraint at all. A mad king public health policy. When I say this is
“the week that Trump became unglued,” I thus do not mean that this is the first
week where we could see that things are bad — or even that we had a mad king
problem. Rather, I mean that this is the week where the full scope of the mad
king problem so undeniable that even some of Trump’s allies on the right began
to see it. The only question now is how the country — and particularly key
members of the Trump coalition — will react. — Posted from Vox
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■ Vox readmite a los dos exconcejales del partido en el Ayuntamiento de València ■ El que fuera su portavoz Juan Manuel Badenas, suspendido temporalmente de militancia, y Cecilia Herrero, que había pedido la baja voluntaria del partido.
SPAIN
Sánchez Unveils €14.1B Anti-Tariff Plan
€7.4B in new funds, €6.7B from existing tools: state guarantees, export insurance & SME aid.
